Cheyenne was shaking by the time she got home from school. Dad tried to reassure her that I would not take her life.She knew it was debatable at this point.

She disobeyed.

Her disobedience cost her $279.00 and a shattered Ipod. She knew the rules. I had reminded her about it last weekend when she went on a bowling excursion with her youth group. As I pocketed her Ipod while driving down the road, I asked her,

“What are the rules with the Ipod, Chy?”

“Until I have $279.00 saved up to replace it, I am not to take it out of the house.”

“And….”

“And I need to socialize like normal teenagers, face to face and I can’t do that playing games.” (Big sigh).

“And?”

“And I need to carry my cell phone instead because it can make phone calls and text you, even without Wifi and my Ipod can’t.”

One week later, Cheyenne had somehow forgotten these rules. While out a friend’s house, she tried to take a picture of their cat when she slipped and her Ipod went sailing to an ice-shattering end.

As I calmed my emotions and took aTIME OUT, I recalled what Jill Savage had written:

“We do need to expect responsibility from our kids. We do need to expect obedience. We do need to expect social skills after we teach and train them to those standards. But we also need to expect them to fail at those things. Yep, you read that right. We need to expect our children to fail…perfection doesn’t exist.” –Jill Savage, NO MORE PERFECT MOMS

I expected obedience. I expected my words to be taken seriously, thinking Cheyenne saw the value and wisdom in my words.

She failed.

She failed to see the bigger picture. Often times, you and I fail to see the bigger picture of what God is teaching us throughout the trenches of motherhood, if not throughout life. We build up high expectations of our children, of motherhood and we fail to experience the joy. We fail to see God’s hand in the messes. We fail to realize there is no such thing as perfection. Sometimes failure is a good thing because we learn a million different ways NOT to do something.

In the end, she learned a $279.00 lesson and I am reminding myself to expect my children to fail. And you know, it isn’t such a bad thing. Failing means learning. It means making messes within the boundaries of childhood while it’s still easy for them clean up their mess under our guidance.

P.s. I found on Amazon a digital repair kit for her Ipod. It cost me $12.00 for the kit and a new screen. I’ll wait until she earns a little more cash before I tell her about it. 🙂 You can find it under Ipod Digitizer Kits.

P.P.S. I AM REALLY LEARNING THIS LESSON. We have rules about playing so close to our flatscreen plasma 40 inch TV. My son was bowling on the wii this morning and you guessed it…he lost control of his remote and it went sailing RIGHT into the tv. Did I mention its our ONLY TV? And it was a gift from my brother??? Oh boy.